Archive for the ‘Super Mario Kart’ Category

Coffee Beans:Super Mario Kart was originally released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in North America on September 1, 1992. It had previously been released in Japan on August 27, 1992 and later in Europe on January 21, 1993.Super Mario Kart was re-released on the Wii’s Virtual Console service in North America on November 23, 2009 and can be downloaded for just 800 Wii Points. The game received an “Everyone” rating from the ESRB, and has no “Content” listed for parents to be aware of.

Did the Virtual Console release of Super Mario Kart putt or speed its way onto the Nintendo Channel? Let’s take a look!

Hours shown are for United States of America Wii owners, not world-wide.

Approx. Number of Players Having Reported Data:Super Mario Kart has 18,376 Wii owners that have reported data through the Wii’s Nintendo Channel, with 519 days reported.

Average & Total Game-Play Hours:Super Mario Kart has 50,005 Total Hours of game-play reported on its debut, with the average play-time being 2 Hours 43 Minutes “Per person”.The game’s average play-time per session is about 31 minutes.

Sale Information:Super Mario Kart is not currently listed in the Virtual Console’s “Popular Titles” section, as of checking around 2:45PM on April 30, 2011. The “Popular Titles” section lists the current top 20 most popular(or purchased, I think!) Virtual Console titles, and while Super Mario Kart isn’t on the list, there is another Mario Kart game in the section.Super Mario Kart’s North American Virtual Console version has made Nintendo about $147,008(before taxes), based on just the approximate number of players that have reported data and the game’s $8 price point.

The game has a 4.5 out of 5 Stars rating on Amazon.com, based on 58 customer reviews.Super Mario Kart’s customer review score average is 90.68%, when the customer reviews are converted to a 100% review scale.

(Review score averages recorded around 2:45PM on April 30, 2011.)

Filtered Thoughts: The description for the game on the Virtual Console says, “Get-in, sit-down, and buckle-up to experience frantic kart racing with the game that started it all.” If you have never seen what Super Mario Kart looks like, or perhaps have forgotten, the video below is a very brief trailer for it.

WARNING: It may bring back awesome memories!

While Super Mario Kart was the first game in Mario’s “Kart” series, it did have a 2-player mode which added great replay value to the game. I remember playing Super Mario Kart with my cousins, and I specifically remember playing a lot of balloon battles in the “versus” mode. I remember having a blast playing the game, and playing it for hours straight sometimes.

As for the data, I think the game taking 519 days to debut is actually pretty slow for a Nintendo Virtual Console game, especially one that has the words “Super”, “Mario”, and “Kart” in its title. It seems more like the game has been putting around collecting hours, than speeding its way around racking up hours. Perhaps the fact that it did debut though, even with both Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart Wii being available on the console, shows that Mario’s Kart series is popular enough to justify more than one console release every 4-5 years?

Questions:Can any of you recall playing Super Mario Kart on the SNES? If you didn’t play it on the SNES, did you perhaps purchase the Virtual Console version? Either way, if you have played it, what do you think about it? Also, do you think Nintendo should do more frequent releases with the Mario Kart series, or just keep the series with a single console release as they have basically done since Super Mario Kart?